by John Anner
photos courtesy of Pacific Links Foundation

Somewhere in the Mekong Delta region of Viet Nam, a young girl sits in school. Let’s call her Thuy. Thuy is 10 years old and studying in the fifth grade. A shy girl, she has large soft eyes and a fair complexion. She doesn’t know it, but all around her malevolent forces are gathering that might condemn her to a life of suffering, shame and exploitation.

Thuy stands at the crossroads between two radically different options for how her life will proceed from here. One fork in the road leads to a high school graduation, work in a local company or possibly even in an office in Ho Chi Minh City. There, she will earn enough money to rent an apartment, buy nice clothes and send money home to her family. Her future is bright with possibility.

The other fork in the road is much darker. Thuy’s parents are starting to wonder if it makes sense to keep her in school much longer. Some of her friends have already dropped out, to help around the house babysitting for younger siblings, tending the family garden or cooking and cleaning.

It costs around $60 a year to keep Thuy in school. Her books, school supplies, uniform and shoes are one expense, but there are also the fees owed to the school for insurance and school maintenance. Her parents don’t make much money. Mom has been sick a lot over the past few years since the last baby was born, and Dad scrapes by on his earnings from his plot of rice land, a few pigs and the occasional off-season work.

They are a typical poor family living in rural Viet Nam; sometimes the whole family lives on an annual income of just $300 to $400. For Thuy’s parents, $60 a year for school is a lot to spend. With two younger brothers also in school, the family budget is stretched thin.

Thuy is just the kind of girl human traffickers are looking for. Voracious in their search for virgin girls with fair complexions to meet the demands of the booming sex industry in other countries, traffickers trawl the farms and villages of the Mekong offering what seems like a deal too good to pass up. They tell the parents and young women that they can find the girl work in Phnom Penh, perhaps helping out a family as a nanny, or getting a job in a restaurant. “She’ll be sending money home in no time!” they tell the father of the house. As an added incentive, they will give the family up-front money.

All too often, the family ignores the horror stories of what has happened to girls from other families, and sends their own child away to Cambodia. What happens next to Thuy is almost too painful to hear—she will most likely be sold to a brothel owner, who will in turn rent her out to a customer for a week of rape and humiliation before she becomes just another girl in the brothel, a victim of sexual servitude condemned to a life of misery.

With any luck, this won’t happen to Thuy. It doesn’t happen to most girls, who grow up to get married, work on the family farm and have kids of their own. But all too often, Vietnamese girls and young women in the Mekong Delta are trafficked across the permeable border into Cambodia. They come mostly from the border provinces of Kien Giang, Dong Thap and An Giang.

Cambodian police estimated in 2004 that more than 50,000 young girls, some as young as 12 years old, were trapped in brothel houses scattered throughout Cambodia. For sex tourists from Australia, Asian countries, America and Western Europe, there is particular demand, in this age of AIDS, for very young girls and virgins. By conservative estimates, as many as 1,000 girls enter the cross-border sex trade every year. According to research conducted by the Asian Migrant Centre, 85 percent of Vietnamese women crossing the border had their first sexual experience as a result of a financial transaction.